Dune
At a glance...
- Directed by Denis Villeneuve
- Released in 2021
- Runtime 155 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: frustratingly incomplete
A visual spectacle, even when watching at home. felt like watching the end point (the first half of the end point, at least) of the cultural desire to slavishly obsess over how close to the original source material movie adaptations of books should be. (I guess on the other hand if you want complete movies nominally about dune you already have like 2 to see). I just think it's not really a whole movie by itself, and I was only able to watch it and not be annoyed by that fact because part 2 is already out. Also, for how groundbreaking this book was for science fiction, there are some tropes in this movie that are truly so tired to see now. I laughed at Dr. Yueh's Chinese existing in the same universe as all these fantasy languages. Did the Communist party of China get wiped out by the sardaukar as well?
Maybe that's nitpicky, idk, I loved the world building in dune the first time I read it and have slowly soured on the specifics of it's racial worldview since then, and I think I'm carrying that into seeing the movie as well. And yet, I put my knitting down to focus on watching this and now I want to see the rest of it, so I'll probably go to a big theater to do so at some point. Maybe what I wish is that they had been brave and put a 5 hour movie with an intermission into theaters instead.